On not acknowledging an animal’s wound: Reading Coetzee with Mulhall

ABSTRACT:Stephan Mulhall has a rare gift for bringing literary texts into dialogue with philosophical ones in ways that are mutually illuminating. In The Wounded Animal, he employs his talent on J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and a wide variety of philosophical writing, including works by Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell. Mulhall draws our attention to the wound borne by Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of Coetzee’s story: she is profoundly alienated from her community, and she is tormented by her perceptions of others (including her own family members), as fundamentally kind and at the same time as morally depraved. Building on Mulhall’s description of Costello, I argue that she suffers from the failure of others to acknowledge her. In order to detail the toll that this failure exacts, I investigate the grammar of acknowledgment. I argue that mutual acknowledgment is essential both to social relationships and to our own understanding of ourselves. Costello’s community abandons her to her own tormenting perceptions, which no one else deigns to acknowledge. The result is one that our study of acknowledgment should lead us to expect: she is isolated, confused, and driven to the brink of madness.